Physicians Prefer Gated Social Media Communities

John Mack, October 23, 2012

Research sponsored by Pfizer and published last month in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, found that over 70% of physicians surveyed (N=485) are either “current users” (52%) or “likely/very likely” users
(19%) of “restricted online communities” (such as Sermo). In this case,
“use” means sharing medical information and staying up to date
professionally. The following chart is a remake of Figure 2 from that
study (find it here).

Wikipedia is the next closest “social media” site used by these docs
(186 oncologists and 299 primary care physicians) –– only 25% of
surveyed physicians said they are current users of Wikipedia. As for
YouTube, 23% of surveyed docs said they were current users.

This survey was conducted in March 2011.

According to Manhattan Research’s Taking the Pulse® v11.0 study (May
2011), only about a third of all “digital” physicians (24% of all
physicians) are using gated physician peer communities like Sermo,
Medscape, DrConnect, PhysicianConnect, Ozmosis, etc.

Some experts, such as Bruce Grant, SVP of Strategic Services at Digitas
Health, in the past have cited other, conflicting data that suggests
physicians interested in using online peer-to-peer social communities
outnumber by 2 to 1 physicians who are actually using them (see “Physician Participation in Peer-to-Peer Social Media Sites”; use discount code P2Pfree).

52% or 24%, whatever! The number of physicians using gated social media
communities for professional purposes far exceeds the number of
physicians using “open” communities such as Twitter or Facebook. Only 7%
of surveyed physicians say they use Twitter in order to share medical
information and stay up to date and 36% of said they either were not
aware of Twitter (3%) or said they would never use Twitter (33%) for
such purposes (another 50% said they were unlikely or not sure if they
would use it)!